


a woman unlike myself is running down the long hall of a lifeless house

by goodbyechunkylemonmilk



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: F/F, Family Issues, Gen, Origin Story, Panic Attacks, Pre-Canon, Pre-Slash, Rule 63
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-11
Updated: 2017-08-11
Packaged: 2018-12-13 22:42:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11769918
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goodbyechunkylemonmilk/pseuds/goodbyechunkylemonmilk
Summary: When Gansey gets stung, her mother takes a week off of work, and her father takes off two, and Helen even comes home from her summer bridge program at Yale. It’s the first time she ever really feels special. She tries to explain about the voice, about Glendower, and her mother laughs, and her father won’t look at her. They explain about oxygen deprivation. Helen gives her a book debunking stories of near-death experiences. She learns to stop talking about it. She clears her browser history after research sessions, until she realizes no one’s watching. Someone stocks every room of the house with Epi-Pens, but no one changes them out when they expire.





	a woman unlike myself is running down the long hall of a lifeless house

When Gansey gets stung, her mother takes a week off of work, and her father takes off two, and Helen even comes home from her summer bridge program at Yale. It’s the first time she ever really feels special. She tries to explain about the voice, about Glendower, and her mother laughs, and her father won’t look at her. They explain about oxygen deprivation. Helen gives her a book debunking stories of near-death experiences. She learns to stop talking about it. She clears her browser history after research sessions, until she realizes no one’s watching. Someone stocks every room of the house with Epi-Pens, but no one changes them out when they expire.

She’s always been self-sufficient, has read books about children who need to be weaned off the impulse to seek out their parents after a nightmare, and it seemed odd, as alien and immature as a belief in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. It can’t accurately be called regressing if it’s a developmental phase she never fully inhabited, but after being stung, she finds herself crying unpredictably, yearning to be hugged, even, on one mortifying occasion, catches her thumb on a collision course with her mouth. Her family tolerates this behavior for two weeks. Her mother has the chef cook her favorite foods, and she is even allowed to take a luxurious three days off from school.

She wakes up screaming, and her mother comes, until she doesn’t. So she learns to let go. She’s never needed anyone else before, and she doesn’t now, but she never forgets the feeling, of being looked at like she’s someone’s whole world, of being watched with such tender care. It sounds ridiculous for a rich girl, spoiled within an inch of her life, to whine that she doesn’t feel like she matters, so she doesn’t.

Finally, she’s old enough to go off on her own, orchestrates a move to England and fills her transcript with independent studies facilitated by a professor she met online, calls it folk studies and history and mathematics, calls her parents once a month so they know she’s alive, and more often than not gets an answering machine or assistant, which is fine. It used to be enough for her, talking to her mother about politics and her father about sports and Helen about clothes, or more specifically how her clothes are too casual, send the wrong message.

She starts to feel like she came back wrong. Her new life ought to feel like a gift, but then, her old life did, money and parties and the salty overbearing taste of caviar. This feels like a debt owed. She has never had to grapple with being undeserving. The act of dying has left a cavernous feeling in her chest, a near-constant ache. CPR breaks ribs if you do it right. People aren’t supposed to come back from the dead without battle scars, wounds to show what they’ve been through. But her welts heal without a trace, and she is left with nothing to show for it except the urge to prove herself, and waking nightmares that disappear for months on end, just long enough for her to think she’s escaped before they reassert themselves with a vengeance.

Boys like her, and she likes them too, well enough. She isn’t as pretty as Helen, not by a long shot, but she holds her own, has what she has been assured many times is a beautiful smile and warm eyes. No one wants to hear about Glendower. Without the story of her death and resurrection, it’s a strange, esoteric quest only a rich fool would devote herself to, and with it, it’s a childish fancy or a cry for help, a fantastical manifestation of survivor’s guilt. She learns to call it a medical marvel, and then not to call it anything at all.

She has a panic attack in front of Malory, and when she’s recovered, transported, somehow, miraculously, to the scratchy couch in his home office, she tells him she has a big test the next day, and gets on the first flight back home. She leaves a note for him with the school administrator, and never checks to see if she gets it. She doesn’t want to know if he looked for her.

It’s easy to cut and run when everything you have can be replaced. She packs her research and two sets of clothes in a carry-on with room left over. Money smooths over her spotty transcript, and she’s freshly enrolled at Aglionby the next day with fresh clothes, a new car, and her bag stowed in a hotel room she technically isn’t old enough to rent.

She meets Ronan in the Aglionby parking lot, surrounded by a group of jeering teenagers and landing a punch to the jaw of a girl who looks just like her but for an extra inch and a tight, no-nonsense bun at the top of her head. Gansey forces her way through the crowd until she finds a likely-looking tour guide, an Asian girl with a sweet face and eyes that lack the bloodlust outsiders wouldn’t expect pampered private school girls to have.

“What’s happening?” she asks, voice so quiet she doesn’t expect the girl to hear, but she does, turns and smiles.

“Ronan Lynch,” she says, hand outstretched for a shake that Gansey accepts on autopilot. “And Devin Lynch,” she continues, so that Gansey, already halfway through her own name, realizes it’s not an introduction, but the explanation she asked for. “They’re having a disagreement. Happens about once a week. I’m Harriett Cheng. Nice to meet you.” She smiles as if the smaller one hasn’t just drawn blood, to the appreciative cheers of the crowd.

“Shouldn’t we do something?”

“Since you’re new here, I’m going to give you some advice: don’t get involved in Lynch family drama. Not worth it.” Harriett pats her on the shoulder and turns away, a small crowd going with her.

The fight winds down soon after, both girls walking away like nothing’s happened. The tall one, the buttoned-up one, straightens her skirt and fixes her tie as if she wasn’t being choked with it two minutes prior. “Find your own way home,” she snaps, and gets in one of the nicest cars in the lot, and drives off at a sensible pace.

The younger one, who looks to be about Gansey’s age, spits a foamy mix of blood and saliva on the pavement. She rakes a hand through the shock of hair cascading over her shoulders. She’s beautiful, but more than that, she’s fascinating. She’s like something out of a dream, and she moves like one, too, like the slightly seasick rocking of a creature that doesn’t make sense in the real world. Gansey spots a discarded uniform tie on the ground and chases after her with it.

“I think you dropped this,” she says, holding it out and feeling nervous, which is novel, the sting of anxiety for a reason other than her remembered half-death.

“Oh.” The girl looks at her, at the tie, and then back at her. She doesn’t take it. Gansey lets her hand fall. “Yeah, probably. Devin’s an idiot for going into a fight with her tie on.” Which makes her Ronan Lynch, a savage name that fits her personally. Gansey nods, as if she’s ever been in a fight, and as if removing her tie would ever have occurred to her before this moment. Ronan smiles, sweet and easy. She holds out her hand, not for the tie, which has already been stuffed in Gansey’s back pocket, but for a handshake, which is a bit slack, a bit over-long, as if she wasn’t taught how to do it properly as soon as she could hold her hand steady. “Ronan Lynch.”

“Gansey.”

“Just Gansey?” she repeats. “Like Cher, but worse?”

“Regina Camille Gansey III. But please, just call me Gansey.”

“All right, Gansey.” Ronan cracks her neck. “Did you want something?”

In Gansey’s experience, people are almost never rude, and Roan isn’t quite either, just uninterested in the obsequious, ingratiating manner the Gansey name typically inspires. The tie excuse having fallen flat, Gansey searches for an explanation other than sheer fascination, which she’s learned people find off-putting. She’s been told she looks at people like bugs under a magnifying glass, like she plans to pin them by their wings and preserve them. She’s learned to soften her gaze, to break eye contact first, but she can’t bring herself to do it with Ronan, who doesn’t flinch anyway. “Can you teach me to fight like that?”

Ronan looks her over, frank and assessing, while Gansey tries not to fidget. “No,” she says, not bothering to sound sorry about it. Gansey isn’t used to rejection, has dumped every boyfriend she’s ever had, hopefully kindly, and she finds herself left with nothing to say. Then Ronan smiles. “You’re not built for speed. I could teach you how to throw a bitch of a punch thought.” The curse sounds awkward in Ronan’s mouth, like she picked up the habit recently and out of spite.

“Good enough. Do you need a ride?”

Ronan looks her over again, longer this time. “Yeah, all right,” she says finally, like she’s doing Gansey a favor. “Devin’s gonna crack and come back for me in ten minutes, and it’ll be hysterical if I’m not here.”

Ronan starts to direct her out of town, and Gansey doesn’t point out that she has a GPS because the lilt of Ronan’s voice is soothing, not quite accented but far from standard American. She’s like no one Gansey has ever heard, and she’s so distracted listening to the way Ronan speaks that she almost misses it, has to execute a sprawling U-turn mid-intersection that gets her honked at by cars on all sides. Ronan grabs at the handle above her window, but when she turns to demand, “What the _fuck_?” her eyes look alive. She is not, Gansey notices, wearing a seatbelt, as if getting in a car with a newly-licensed stranger is something she does every day.

“Sorry, I just moved here, and I’ve been looking for an apartment.” Gansey grins up at the dilapidated factory, a For Sale sign nearly covered by the brush. “Do you mind?”

“Go for it.” Ronan’s out of the car by the time the sentence is over, kicking her way through the overgrown weeds around Gansey’s makeshift parking spot.

“You’re going to get ticks,” Gansey says, listening with some irritation to the droning ring on the other end of her phone. Ronan scoffs, loud enough for her to hear, and then disappears inside.

Gansey doubles the asking price for the sake of expediency. By the time she’s convinced the owner to drive down immediately with the deed and a locksmith, Ronan has been inside long enough for it to be worrisome. Gansey heads in with some trepidation, afraid she’s going to find Ronan splayed out with a broken leg, surrounded by the detritus of the floor that gave out beneath her. Ronan doesn’t seem like the type to call for help. What an entrance to Henrietta that would be, taking possession of a building just in time to be sued for negligence by the parents of her late friend. Although the way Harriett said, “Lynch family drama” implied there was something darker behind it, so maybe she’ll just be killed in the dead of night, which at least has the benefit of being more romantic than a sting to the face.

Ronan whoops from somewhere inside, and the moment between hearing her and recognizing the sound of raw exhilaration is terrifying. Ronan isn’t anywhere on the first floor, at least not that Gansey can see, though she could be hidden behind any of the machinery of indeterminate purpose. She takes the rickety stairs wo at a time, nearly stumbling over the hole in the third from the top, and follows Ronan’s bootprints through the dusty main room into a smaller one at the back that must have been an office, an old PC on the desk. Ronan is halfway out the window.

Gansey resists the urge to tug her back in, and walks over at a more sedate pace. “This reminds me of a treehouse I had when I was little,” Ronan says, the windowsill digging into the flesh of her stomach where her shirt’s ridden up.

Gansey raises an eyebrow, unseen. Ronan seems like the kind of girl who broke a lot of bones growing up. “You had a treehouse that looked like an industrial warehouse?”

Ronan’s shoulders, out over open air, shrug up and down. “Kinda. My dad made it. We had platforms all over the forest, like a real-life jungle gym. It was pretty cool.” She pulls herself back in, and Gansey’s heartrate returns to normal. Then Ronan smiles, and it’s off again. “Are you hungry? Beating Devin’s ass always makes me ravenous.”

Gansey doesn’t point out that the two of them seemed pretty evenly-matched, and nods.

The food shows up at the same time as the now former owner, so Ronan tucks in without her, cross-legged on the floor without a thought for her uniform skirt being ruined. Gansey sticks the freshly-signed deed into the desk in the office, and notices Ronan’s phone just as it vibrates itself onto the floor. She takes it out with her, and offers it to Ronan, who glances at it before tossing it away. “Devin’s worried I’ve been kidnapped. We’ll let her sweat a little longer.” Gansey likes the sound of that, not the act itself, which seems rather cold, but the _we_ , particularly said in Ronan’s voice.

She doesn’t get Ronan home until half past ten, and her father comes out to greet her. “You had Devin worried,” he says, as if it’s something to be proud of.

Ronan straightens up, out of the slouch that seemed so intrinsic to her that Gansey failed to notice it. “That’ll teach her to leave me at school.”

“So who’s your friend?” He looks like a man who’s had a rough life, but not as rough as anyone stupid enough to cross him, thick arms littered with scars and one eye swollen shut. Ronan looks at him like he’s the only one around, and when he asks about Gansey, she seems shocked by her presence. Gansey can’t see a gate for miles, but the Lynch family land still is clearly a place not meant for outsiders.

“This is Gansey. She’s new.” Ronan says _new_ like it’s something incredible, as if Gansey appeared out of thin air seconds before they met. “Gansey, this is my dad, Niall Lynch.”

He looks her over, assessing just like his daughter, but unlike Ronan, he seems to find her wanting, engulfs her hand in a brief, crushing shake before letting his eyes skate over her. “She’ll never find her way out of the woods this late.”

Gansey wants to defend herself, or at least her technology, but Ronan just nods, as if defying her father has never once occurred to her. “She can stay over.” Niall shrugs, kisses Ronan on the check, and disappears in the cloud of dust kicked up by his BMW. Ronan watches him go, looking bereft, and then heads for the front door, Gansey’s input on her own sleeping arrangements being, apparently, superfluous.

She sleeps on Ronan’s floor, even though a house this size must have guest rooms. Ronan’s mother sets her up with a sleeping bag pulled from a cupboard Gansey would have sworn wasn’t large enough to hold it. The next morning, she’s outfitted in Ronan’s younger sister’s extra uniform, which swamps her and has a mystery stain on the left sleeve. Ronan goes with her to Monmouth after school, and they start the cleaning process, although Ronan spends most of her time lying on her back and tracing patterns in the dust she’s supposed to be sweeping up.

She hasn’t had a panic attack since she fled England, so it takes her by surprise when she collapses next to the bonfire they’ve built to clear out everything the former owner left behind. Ronan pats her back a few times, like she’s trying to clear out some food in the wrong pipe, and then sits quietly, close enough to be a comfort, far enough to keep from crowding.

Ronan stays for dinner, Chinese from a restaurant that doesn’t offer delivery but for the offer of a hundred dollar tip. Gansey hasn’t known her long, but they’ve spent enough time together for her to understand that Ronan has no particular talent for deception. If Ronan seems to feel like nothing’s changed, she must truly believe it. Still, old habits die hard, so after she’s seen Ronan off, she packs what she can’t live without and lets herself into her newly-purchased passion project, a brilliantly orange wreck of a car.

The Pig breaks down at the city limits, and the fantastical part of her imagines it’s a sign, all of Henrietta reaching out for her, but the truth, of course, is that she took a car that barely runs because she doesn’t want to go. Henrietta doesn’t feel like home, not yet, but she thinks it could, thinks she could slot Ronan and Monmouth and even Aglionby into the parts of her heart she seems to be missing.

She gets the call while she’s on the phone with a mechanic, negotiating an exorbitant fee that she suspects he’s made up because he can hear money in her voice. She has him on speaker so she can lean over the hood and do a bad job of describing the problem to him, so she sees when Devin’s name pops up. Devin cornered her in one of the Barns’ many winding, leading-nowhere hallways, and demanded that she put the number into her phone, said, “For emergencies,” like she knew something Gansey didn’t. She hangs up on the mechanic without saying anything.

“Our father’s been killed,” Devin says, business-like as usual. “Ronan needs you. Come to the police station.” She hangs up without waiting for a response, as if there’s no question that Gansey will come. And, of course, there isn’t; she barely remembers to lock the Pig’s doors before she’s on her way.


End file.
